The President's Killers (7 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

How could an information operator at the National Security Council be unfamiliar with SIG?

If she didn’t know anything about SIG, who did? What the hell was going on?

Denny stuck the phone back on the hook, his mind reeling. How was he going to get in touch with Lott? Lott hadn’t even given him the name of his motel. Wait at the Stardust, he’d said. But Lott had no idea he was going to be mistaken for an assassin.

He turned the radio on again. On every station they were talking about the shooting in Forest Park. Now there was a mixture of local reports and bulletins from the national networks.

Both the President and Mayor Jordan were wounded. No one knew yet how seriously. Again and again the announcers repeated the report that a white male, possibly bearded, sped away from the park in a small white car after the shooting.

Click. Click.

“To repeat the latest development in the shootings in Forest Park — an all-points bulletin has been issued for the arrest of the young man seen fleeing from the park after the shooting. He is believed to be armed and extremely dangerous.”

Denny stared at the radio. My God, they really think he’s the shooter! What the hell has Lott gotten him into?

He thought of the TV programs he’d seen about Lee Harvey Oswald and Martin Luther King’s assassin, James Earl Ray. Both claimed to be innocent. They insisted they were patsies, set up by someone else to take the blame. Nobody believed them.

Maybe Lott and McQueen weren’t who they said they were. Lott had shown him a badge. He remembered the huge letters: SIG. But the badge didn’t prove anything. It could have been phony. There were ads in hunting magazines for badges. You could order any type of badge you wanted. On the web, you could probably buy a badge with your own initials stamped on it.

All he knew about SIG was what Lott and McQueen had told him. Maybe there was no such organization. Maybe the switchboard operator never heard of SIG because it didn’t exist.

Call Mrs. Shamburg, Lott had said. Was that “sham” as in phony? Maybe the name she used was a code word. Maybe everything she said to him was some sort of intelligence-agency doubletalk.

His mind was racing wildly. He’d taken his laptop with him when he went to Shoney’s to eat. It was still on the back seat. In his past efforts to Google SIG and McQueen and Lott, he had found nothing. But he had to try again. There had to be clues of some kind.

What if there weren’t any? Maybe he should just turn himself in. Maybe he should just drive back to Forest Park and identify himself to the first cop he saw.

Of course, nobody was going to believe him any more than people believed Oswald or Ray. What if nobody from SIG came forward? What evidence did he have that he was working for them? He’d never seen a SIG letter or document, never seen a SIG logo or insignia, never seen a SIG office. That day at the Rodino Building in Newark Lott hadn’t even met him in an office. He met him in the damn lobby.

How could he have been so stupid?

TWENTY-FIVE

He couldn’t stay where he was. He had to get as far from Forest Park as he could. Glancing up and down the street, he decided to get back on Interstate 44.

In the rearview mirror, the Hyundai’s shattered rear window looked as conspicuous as a red flag. He spotted a cardboard box in a vacant lot and crammed pieces of it against the window. At least it made the broken glass less noticeable.

He drove back to the service road beside the interstate, and followed it until he was able to enter the highway’s westbound lanes. The traffic was heavy in both directions. Many of the cars and trucks were white. The Hyundai would blend in with them.

He kept his speed at sixty, letting other cars and tractor-trailer trucks roar past him. He didn’t want to have some cop pull him over for speeding.

Within a few minutes, however, there were fewer and fewer commercial establishments, only open farmland. The traffic thinned out. Clouds were moving in, and the morning was becoming gray and hazy.

Tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa
.

What the hell? He scanned the sky but saw nothing.

Then he saw it through his windshield, only a hundred feet above him. A small, glass-bubble helicopter with two seats. It quickly overtook the cars and trucks ahead of him and sailed on above the highway.

On the radio, the flood of reports on the shootings in Forest Park continued, but there was no new information.

Then came the bombshell.

“We have just received tragic news,” an excited announcer said. “The Associated Press is reporting that President Colin Patrick is dead. The President was pronounced dead at Barnes-Jewish Hospital at seven-ten this morning, just twenty minutes ago, of gunshot wounds to the chest.”

It was staggering. Denny had never cared for Patrick, partly because life had been so incredibly generous to him — rich from birth, all the best schools, a resume that started with governor. Denny had always wondered how much he really cared about the concerns of ordinary people. Still, he felt saddened. Patrick’s face and voice — his awkward laugh — were so familiar it was almost as if a family member had died.

The radio said Mayor Jordan had been struck in the right shoulder by a bullet. The wound was not life-threatening.

“Meanwhile,” the announcer said, “police and federal authorities have launched a massive manhunt to try to find the young white male with the dark beard seen fleeing from the park in a small white car after the attack on the President. They believe he may be headed somewhere to the south or west of the city.”

The hair on Denny’s arms stood on end.
They’re talking about me! They really think I’m the idiot who killed the President!

He glanced up at the cloudy skies. The chopper was lower now, much closer to the highway. Watching it, he realized it was growing larger. It was coming back.

TWENTY-SIX

Tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa.

Just ahead of him was an overpass for a narrow crossroad. Denny swung onto the exit ramp, then veered to the right and found himself on a blacktop road that ran parallel to the highway. He slammed to a halt beneath several leafy maples.

The chopper glided over the highway, nose tilted downward. It was no more than thirty feet above the road. He could see the earphones on the two officers inside.

He held his breath as the helicopter floated past and quickly grew smaller as it moved down the highway. Then it was gone.

The interstate was clearly too dangerous. He started down the narrow back road, wondering where it would take him. The road wound back and forth, rising and falling with the rugged terrain. On his left was a steep, thickly wooded ridge. On his right, below him, was a picturesque valley dotted with farm buildings and pastures and small fields of crops.

His brain wouldn’t stop going over the events of the past few weeks, rehashing every conversation he’d had with Lott and McQueen, reexamining every word of their conversations and everything that had happened.

Were they for real? Lott had led him right to the place where the President was shot. That was incredible. How did that happen? Was Lott somehow part of an assassination plot?

He drove past a trailer park, then a small development of cheap frame houses. When he glanced up at his rearview mirror, he saw a car immediately behind him and pulled over to let it pass.

He came to a cross road and turned onto it. It was more secluded, with nothing but woods and scattered daisies on either side of it.

A mile farther on, he passed a dozen mobile homes scattered among the trees.

Behind him, a horn blared.

In the mirror he saw a red pickup almost on his bumper. The driver was a teenager with shoulder-length blond hair. A girl was nestled beside him.

Denny got out of their way. As they sped past, the girl gawked at him. The pickup continued down the road for a half mile, then halted on the shoulder. He slowed down but the pickup didn’t move. When he went past them, the two teenagers stared at him.

Had they heard the news reports? Had they noticed the shattered rear window or his stubble beard?

In the mirror, he saw them start forward again, staying about a block behind him. He wanted to floor the gas pedal, but resisted the impulse. That would only make them more suspicious.

At the next crossroad, he turned left. They made the turn, too. They were following him.

He drove along the road for nearly another mile before coming upon a dozen modest ranch homes and small cabins. Some of the cabins were badly discolored and run-down, their gutters hanging and window screens battered. He couldn’t tell whether they were occupied or abandoned.

On the ground beside several of the homes were TV satellite dishes. The yards were decorated with plastic deer and wooden rabbits. Here and there was a vegetable garden or an old house trailer at the edge of a lot.

Just ahead of him on his left was a cabin perched on a high, wooded embankment beside the road. Its windows were boarded up. He stopped in front of the cabin, got out of the car, and opened the trunk. The red pickup was approaching. He stuck his head into the trunk, pretending to be occupied with something as the teenagers went past, gawking at him.

He waited until they were almost a block ahead of him. Then he maneuvered the Hyundai up the steep, angled driveway leading to the cabin. At the top of the embankment his way was blocked by a chain stretched across the driveway. He could go no farther.

He tucked the Glock under his belt, grabbed his laptop and a plastic bottle of water from the back seat, and got out of the car. Part of the Hyundai was visible from the road below. He found two fallen tree branches and propped them against the rear window, then stepped back to take another look.

At the bottom of the driveway he could see part of an old white frame house across the road. On the front porch, sitting in a rocking chair, was a ghostly, white-haired man watching him.

TWENTY-SEVEN

At 1:22 P.M. FBI Special Agent Jim Moran heard a victory whoop.

It came from a wooded area in Forest Park where federal agents and police officers were combing the bushes.

The tall, gangly agent-in-charge of the FBI’s St. Louis field office hurried across the road and pushed his way through the outer brush. In the shady interior, he found a dozen beaming agents and uniformed cops clustered around a fallen oak.

“Hey, Jim take a look at this!” an agent yelled.

They let him through.

“Look what these guys found under this tree.”

The agent pointed to a rifle lying on the ground.

The fallen tree was only a few hundred feet from where several spent shells had been found in a patch of trampled grass beneath bushes at the edge of the woods.

“It’s a Remington, same caliber as the shells,” one of the officers said.

The weapon was clean. No rust. It hadn’t been lying out in the rain for months. Moran’s hopes soared. If it was the assassination weapon, they ought to be able to trace it from the manufacturer all the way to recent owners.

He pumped the hands of the two police officers who found the weapon.

“Great work.” The sky was becoming darker. “Let’s keep it going, everybody. Let’s see what else we can turn up before we all get drenched.”

To keep the media and public at bay, the police had cordoned off part of the park. Moran started back to the Jewel Box, the park’s plant and floral conservatory, where a makeshift command post had been established.

Finding the rifle gave him a lot more confidence. A veteran of twenty-two years in the Bureau, with street experience in Kansas City and Los Angeles, he had worked in fields as diverse as bank robbery, counterintelligence, and organized crime.

He was assistant agent-in-charge of the field office in Oklahoma City, where he grew up. But only four months had passed since he was transferred to St. Louis and designated a full-fledged special agent-in-charge. Nobody expected to find him heading up the investigation of a presidential assassination.

The entrance to the Jewel Box was crowded with agents and police officers munching on sandwiches sent over by the Art Museum’s snack bar. The hot beef smelled good and he realized he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since seven that morning.

The front desk was covered with trays of sandwiches and soft drinks. He helped himself to two Sloppy Joes and a plastic cup filled with lemonade, and squeezed onto a bench laden with boxes of red and white impatiens.

A bulky police sergeant sat down near him with a grin on his face. He looked familiar, but Moran didn’t remember where they’d met.

“I hear they found the weapon, Jim.”

Moran nodded, his mouth too full to reply.

The sergeant shook his head. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for that sorry son-of-a-bitch’s chances.”

“Well,” Moran said, “let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now.”

He returned to the front desk for a chocolate cupcake and gulped it down. He was wiping his fingers on a paper napkin when the radio man rushed into the office.

“They’ve got the car, Jim.”

“Where?”

“Found it beside some woods. Off Interstate 44. Fifteen, twenty miles from here.”

It’s over, Moran thought. We’ve got the son-of-a-bitch.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Except for the raindrops falling lightly on the leaves of the trees and shrubbery, nothing moved.

The woods of towering oaks and hickories seemed devoid of life. The rain sounded like a thousand dripping faucets, the gentle patter gradually intensifying, then suddenly tapering off again.

Denny felt only a few cool raindrops on his face and the top of his head, the trees and shrubbery protecting him almost as well as an umbrella.

He had buried his laptop beneath some rocks in a creek. He didn’t want cops or federal agents to get their hands on the personal information on it. Somewhere he had read that shelters for women encouraged them to dismantle their cell phones to keep their estranged husbands or lovers from tracking them. So he had taken his cell phone apart and tossed the pieces, one by one, into the bushes as he trudged through the woods.

The trouble was, he was no longer sure where he was going. When he entered the woods, he had headed west, moving parallel to the road, only a few hundred feet behind the houses. After awhile he turned and plunged straight into the woods for maybe a mile, then began to double back toward the east. The radio announcers had said he was believed to be headed south or west, so he kept bearing to the east.

In places where there was no underbrush, he could see almost a hundred feet through the thin veil of fog around the ramrod-straight tree trunks. The air was thick with the smell of leaves and damp wood. In every direction, the long, dark trunks of fallen trees littered the ground or leaned at grotesque angles against other trees. He had to straddle some to get over them.

In time, the rain let up and finally stopped. After hiking through the woods for a couple of hours, his thighs and the calves of his legs had begun to ache. But the steep, wooded hills were behind him now, the ground rising and falling in gentle slopes. Off to his right, something moved. He didn’t see it, he sensed it.

There, forty feet from him, was a beautiful doe. Her dark brown and tan fur blending perfectly into the woods around her. She stood perfectly still, the black eyes in the thin face staring at him, ears erect.

When he slid his right foot forward, the doe bounded off, gliding through the trees as silently as a ghost, its white tail vanishing behind the brush.

The entire sky was slate gray now. Earlier, it had been a touch lighter in the east, but he could make out no gradations now. For all he knew, he could be walking in a huge circle.

When he came to a small field, he stopped to study the clouds.

Tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa.

He dropped to his knees in the waist-high weeds. The helicopter drew closer and closer, but he could see nothing in the sky, only the dark clouds.

Then he heard a second chopper.